Typically, this was long hours of hard physical labour, though this varied across different camps. Many camps worked their prisoners to death. Approximately one million people died in concentration camps over the course of the Holocaust. This figure does not include those killed at extermination camps.
The crematorium at Majdanek Extermination Camp. Between its establishment in and its liberation in , over 78, people were murdered at Majdanek. Extermination camps were used by the Nazis from to to murder Jews and, on a smaller scale, Roma. These were:. The facility contained three gas vans in which victims were murdered by carbon monoxide poisoning.
Once dead, the vans were driven to a nearby forest and the victims were buried in mass graves. These camps were specifically built near railway lines to make transportation easier. Instead of vans, stationary gas chambers, labelled as showers, were built to murder people with carbon monoxide poisoning created using diesel engines.
A concentration camp had been established at Majdanek in In the spring of , following the Wannsee Conference, the camp was adapted to become an extermination camp by the addition of gas chambers and crematoria. Auschwitz-Birkenau was a complex, consisting of a concentration camp, a forced labour camp and an extermination camp. Eventually it had a network of more than 40 satellite camps. Following tests in September , the lethal gas Zyklon B was selected as the method of murder.
Auschwitz initially had one gas chamber at the Auschwitz I camp, but this was soon expanded. By , four new crematoria, with gas chambers attached, had been built in Auschwitz II. Approximately 1. Not everyone who arrived at the extermination camps was murdered on arrival. Some were selected for various work tasks to help the camp operations run smoothly. Jobs included sorting and processing the possessions of everyone who arrived at the camp, administrative work and heavy manual work.
The majority of those selected for any kind of work within this type of camp would die within weeks or months of their arrival from lack of food, disease or overwork. Those that survived were often killed after a short period and replaced with new arrivals.
Over the course of the Holocaust, more than three million people were killed at extermination camps. To escape antisemitism in Germany, the Wiener family had moved to Amsterdam in In , Ruth was incarcerated in Westerbork transit camp and later Bergen-Belsen concentration camp with her mother and two sisters.
At some camps inmates could still receive and send post. The Red Cross facilitated many of these letters between countries at war with each other. This telegram was sent from Dr. Wilhelm Gross, who was incarcerated in Westerbork transit camp, to his daughter Dora Gross, who had escaped as a refugee to Britain. Transit camps were camps where prisoners were briefly detained prior to deportation to other Nazi camps.
Following the start of the Second World War , the Nazis occupied a number of countries. For more Visiting Information click here. Jewish prisoners in the camps during the Holocaust suffered forced labor, starvation rations and the horrific daily lineups. Despite this, prisoners were still resourceful and heroic, and strove to maintain their humanity and Jewish identity. Read More Photos Testimonies Artifacts Documents Art.
Thrace, Greece- Inmates cooking soup in a transit camp, before the period of deportations from Thrace to Auschwitz and Treblinka, which took place from March , Yad Vashem Photo Archives, Dachau, Germany- Prof. Ernst Holzloehner left and Dr. Thebes, Greece- Jewish forced laborers in a camp in ;Third from the left is Into Shymshi, submitter of the photograph, and in the front of the photograph, wearing a uniform and a hat, is David Matzista, a Jewish kapo.
Remnants of the rouge that Roza Sperling and her daughter Marilla used to give an impression of health and vitality during the selections at the various camps they were imprisoned in The rouge was preserved in a folded piece of celluloid paper that they kept hidden. Whip used for beating inmates in the Buchenwald concentration camp Victor Webb, a British soldier who was one of the liberators of the camp, took the whip.
Experiences in the Concentration Camps. Henri Pieck , Behind Barbed Wire, Richard Grune , Whippings and Forced Labor, Lithograph Gift of C. Yad Vashem Har Hazikaron P. Phone: 2 Fax: 2 Email: webmaster yadvashem. By contrast, Auschwitz, whose name has become practically a synonym for the Holocaust, was an official K. The first people to be gassed there, in September, , were invalids and Soviet prisoners of war. It became the central site for the deportation and murder of European Jews in , after other camps closed.
The vast majority of Jews brought to Auschwitz never experienced the camp as prisoners; more than eight hundred thousand of them were gassed upon arrival, in the vast extension of the original camp known as Birkenau. Only those picked as capable of slave labor lived long enough to see Auschwitz from the inside. Many of the horrors associated with Auschwitz—gas chambers, medical experiments, working prisoners to death—had been pioneered in earlier concentration camps.
Oswald Pohl, the S. The most ambitious was the construction of a brick factory near Sachsenhausen, which was intended to produce a hundred and fifty million bricks a year, using cutting-edge equipment and camp labor. The failure of the factory, as Wachsmann describes it, was indicative of the incompetence of the S. To turn prisoners into effective laborers would have required giving them adequate food and rest, not to mention training and equipment.
It would have meant treating them like employees rather than like enemies. But the ideological momentum of the camps made this inconceivable. Labor was seen as a punishment and a weapon, which meant that it had to be extorted under the worst possible circumstances. Prisoners were made to build the factory in the depths of winter, with no coats or gloves, and no tools. This debacle did not discourage Himmler and Pohl.
On the contrary, with the coming of war, in , S. On the eve of the war, the entire K. New camps were built to accommodate the influx of prisoners from conquered countries and then the tens of thousands of Red Army soldiers taken prisoner in the first months after Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the U. The enormous expansion of the camps resulted in an exponential increase in the misery of the prisoners.
Food rations, always meagre, were cut to less than minimal: a bowl of rutabaga soup and some ersatz bread would have to sustain a prisoner doing heavy labor. The result was desperate black marketing and theft. At the same time, the need to keep control of so many prisoners made the S. The murder of prisoners by guards, formerly an exceptional event in the camps, now became unremarkable.
But individual deaths, by sickness or violence, were not enough to keep the number of prisoners within manageable limits. Accordingly, in early Himmler decided to begin the mass murder of prisoners in gas chambers, building on a program that the Nazis had developed earlier for euthanizing the disabled.
During the following months, teams of S. Everything was done with an appearance of medical rigor. Under this extermination program, known to S. By early , it had become obsolete, as the scale of death in the camps increased. Now the killing of weak and sick prisoners was carried out by guards or camp doctors, sometimes in gas chambers built on site. Those who were still able to work were increasingly auctioned off to private industry for use as slave labor, in the many subcamps that began to spring up around the main K.
The work was brutally demanding, especially for women who were sick, starved, and exhausted. When a worker reached the end of her usefulness, she was sent back to the camp, most likely to be killed.
By the end of the war, the number of people who had died in the concentration camps, from all causes—starvation, sickness, exhaustion, beating, shooting, gassing—was more than eight hundred thousand.
The figure does not include the hundreds of thousands of Jews gassed on arrival at Auschwitz. If the K.
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